This scene is a plein air piece I did a few years ago at a spot that is near and dear to my childhood memories. I grew up in a small town called Little Silver, NJ which is next to the Shrewsbury River. In the summer, this place was the scene of crabbing, seining and the occasional boat ride. In the winter, we skated. Just beyond the train trestle lies Fort Monmouth, whose bugle calls were clearly heard on our side of town, which is due to close in a month. So many adventures we had along that shoreline!

So, what does this have to do with social media? Recently, someone created a Facebook page entitled, You know you are from Little Silver when.... . It prompted such a response that I had to turn off the email alerts for that page because my iPhone was dinging constantly and my inbox was getting choked! Nostalgia is a siren though, and I find myself visiting the page often. Viewing a time a place through the yellowed window of time is somehow soothing. It's also fascinating to see the commonality of experiences, characters and places throughout the generations. The things that made our town special.

It occurred to me that You know you are from Little Silver when.... is more than just an amusing trip down memory lane. It's a social history of what it was like to grow up in a small New Jersey town in the 60's and 70's. This is stuff that normally gets lost to history. It's the children's history; our grammar school principle commonly referred to as "Brick", Henry the candy shop owner, Bella the bag lady who wandered our streets. It's our favorite hangouts, cut-throughs and secret places. It's the old sagging Victorian mansion with the over grown hedge maze that we were certain was inhabited by a witch. It's the pizza parlor where all our initials were carved into the wooden booths.

Taken as a whole, we can see what was important to us then. What we where scared of, how we interacted, what was fun and what wasn't is all on record. Such information is vital to the interpretation of history. I hope that historians will be able to harvest that information from social media tools such as Facebook, rather than simply post and tweet factoids and "today in history" blurbs.

We tend to see social media as a conduit with which we can push information and we forget it is a place that also hosts information. I suppose the challenge for historians has always been simply, knowing where to look.